1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for identifying prosody and an apparatus and a method for recognizing speech. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for identifying prosody on the basis of features of input speech and an apparatus and a method for recognizing speech using the prosody identification.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, use of speech recognition technologies has become widespread. In known speech recognition technologies, information about phonemes (hereinafter referred to as “phoneme information”) contained in speech among other information is recognized. In widely used speech recognition technologies, information about prosody (hereinafter referred to as “prosody information”), which is one kind of information contained in speech other than phonemes, is not actively utilized.
However, some known technologies utilize prosody information. For example, a technology described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 04-66999 utilizes prosody information in order to more appropriately determine the position of a border between phonetic syllables. However, in this technology, the prosody information is utilized as supplementary information to improve the accuracy of the speech recognition. That is, a variety of information items contained in the prosody information is not explicitly identified.